@horse_ebooks

From Encyclopedia Dramatica

@horse_ebooks is a Twitter spambot created by what looks like a RussianMark Zuckerberg called Alexei Kouznetsov and operated by Buzzfeed. Hipsters and Something Awfulgoons worshiped it due to it posting lolrandomshit. The account was registered on August 5th, 2010 and the earliest known tweet made by the bot was on February 6th, 2011. It was revealed to be a sham piece of modern art September 24, 2013.

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@Horse_ebooks is a Twitter bot designed and automated by apparently some Russian guy to sell worthless, horrible ebooks about horses. In order to avoid being detected as a spam bot, it occasionally posts a text snippet or two from one of its ebooks, chosen at random.

Contents

September 14th, 2011

On September 14th 2011, Horse_ebooks started posting from web rather than the custom "Horse_ebooks" client it was posting from before. This was immediately proceeded by a slew of insane posts. This was considered odd by the nerds who followed it, who noted that before this date the crazy shit that Horse_ebooks posted use to come less frequently. As is the behavior of all hipsters, Horse_ebooks fans started complaining that the account was now funnier than before, claiming that the account was "hacked".

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September 14, when Horse_ebooks [...] started posting them directly "from the web." It had always tweeted asinine search-engine optimization and blog-monetizing sales pitches, but now there seemed to be a few more sprinkled in with the insane interjections. This led to the strangest phenomenon of all: dozens of smart, funny insightful people spending day after day on Twitter, complaining, "Horse_ebooks SUCKS now," even tweeting at the account itself and berating it. Just picture someone getting mad at a bot, like your roommate irrationally screaming "fuck you" at a microwave display that counted down to zero and scrolled, "Enjoy...your...meal...."

This was, of course, complete bullshit. The best explanation at the time was that the Russian spammer behind the account probably switched spambot software, or maybe even noticed the fact that his spam account had 40 thousand followers and tweaked it's algorithm to give people more of what they wanted, LOLRANDUM nonsense and truncated posts scraped from random places on the Internet.

Moar Liek Scambot

What really happened was a shady criminal organization known as Buzzfeed acquired @horse_ebooks through unknown means to further their own nefarious goals. Ever since 2011, each and every one of the thousands of seemingly nonsense tweets from @horse_ebooks was actually composed by either Jacob Bakkila or Thomas Bender, both of whom work or worked at Buzzfeed. They called the account “conceptual-art”, a phrase whose closest English cognate is “Irredeemable shit,” best demonstrated by Spaghettios.

This revelation was a piss-take on all of the @horse_ebooks fanbois, who had followed on twitter, wrote fanfic, and even bought IRL posters featuring the not-so-spambot's garbage output. Mild mannered internet reporter Adrian Chen was vindicated by the revelation, as his “outing” of the account operator was only outdated by half a fucking year. This was the most up to date story he had written over his entire career, putting him right up there with the shadier Stephanie Meyer blogs in terms of journalistic ability.